There’s something of a chasm between the respective styles employed by Larry June and 2 Chainz. On one side of the scale sits June as the everyman iconoclast, whose nonchalant approach—spitting simple flexes and straightforward routines over post-hyphy beats and serene loops—barely gets his heart rate above resting. Staring across from him is 2 Chainz as trap’s resident elder statesman, who’s made his bones in the sub-genre wielding his larger-than-life presence with absurdity and spontaneity. So at first, Life Is Beautiful, a collaboration featuring the duo and the Alchemist, seems like an improbable logic problem: an album that seeks to enjoin a square peg with a round hole.
For years now, the Alchemist has been steadily transitioning away from crafting the bone-shuddering boom-bap beats of his early career and toward furnishing dreamscapes with psychedelic loops and minimal effects. It has cemented the Beverly Hills-raised legend as a go-to producer for indie darlings and mainstream stars alike, weaving brilliant albums with Boldy James, Earl Sweatshirt, and Roc Marciano, tinkering and experimenting to tailor to his collaborators’ idiosyncrasies. But Life Is Beautiful’s three-body problem proves to be a tad more difficult. Catering to June’s laid-back temperament, the triumvirate play around in a breezy, luxurious atmosphere (not unlike that of the Alchemist’s sauntering, 2023 EP, Flying High). Yet, the competency can feel a tad underwhelming at times, as though you can feel the meat being left on the bone by the reduced hunger.
It mirrors the strategy employed on The Great Escape, the 2023 link-up between June and the Alchemist. A placid haze settles over the 37-minute runtime of Life Is Beautiful, turning the production into an easy-listening exercise: You can almost hear the waves lapping in the background of “I Been” as the synths take control, or feel yourself drifting away to the serene vocal sample (which sounds eerily reminiscent of those old Italian movie theme songs) on the opener “Munyon Canyon.” In terms of beat selection, there are sparse callbacks to the Alchemist’s boom-bap tendencies—the mafioso piano loop on “Colossal” rattles around in the listener’s brain, while “Bad Choices” blares with its loud mix and screaming soul interpolation—but much of the production’s best moments hinge on making that drumless minimalism stretch for June and 2 Chainz. Little more than a fluttering flute sample fills the atmosphere on “Life Is Beautiful,” providing a brilliant foil to the pair’s deep tenors as they celebrate their victories.
